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Who knew that cinnamon can lower your cholesterol and prevent diabetes

I absolutely love cinnamon, so when I found this article about its amazing superpowers I obviously just had to tell you about it. But firstly – what exactly is it?

Cinnamon is the rolled, pressed and dried up inner bark from Cassia trees, which are native to Sri Lanka but cultivated in South America, Vietnam, India, Madagascar and Egypt. The superpower benefits of cinnamon might be news to me but cinnamon and cinnamon extract have been popular ‘medicines’ for thousands of years.

Sought after and used by ancient civilisations, including the Chinese and the Egyptians, cinnamon was listed as one of the 350 ‘medicinal plants’ by Hippocrates. According to the book, New Healing Herbs by Michael Castleman, cinnamon is commonly used as treatment for nausea and indigestion and also has antibiotic qualities. But those benefits are old news. This article below is written by Joyce Schneider, a health writer from New York, whom I follow on Twitter.

Cinnamon has 5 times as many antioxidants as ½ cup of bluberries or a cup of pomegranate juice.

Some of our best medicines are in our kitchen cabinet, not the bathroom cabinet. Recent, surprising studies show that some herbs and spices are antioxidant powerhouses — and that cinnamon is the second highest. (Cloves are the first, but are harder to work into our daily diet).

Here is a list of the top ten antioxidant spices. All these substances have something wonderful in common: their shared anti-inflammatory power is commonly described as helping arthritis sufferers and people with other types of pain. But the bigger picture of antioxidants’ anti-inflammatory power is their ability to reduce inflammation of the inner lining of the arteries and neutralize LDL (bad cholesterol)’s ability to deposit cholesterol, thus preventing atherosclerosis.